Basket-style carriers are commonly employed to package beverage bottles. They include a separate cell for each bottle, from which the bottles can be readily removed, and a center handle partition for carrying the package. The carriers are fabricated from a blank which is folded and glued into collapsed carrier form, after which the collapsed carrier is erected and the bottles inserted. The loaded basket carriers are then shipped to retail sites in open-top packing trays. Packing trays conventionally have been of rectangular shape designed to hold four basket carriers, with the smooth inner faces of the packing tray walls being dimensioned to allow the carriers to tightly fit after being dropped into place.
More recently designed packing trays are formed of molded plastic. To reduce the weight and cost of the trays their walls consist of spaced segments which are reinforced by vertical struts or posts. This effectively reduces the interior packing space if the outer dimensions of the trays remain the same as the dimensions of trays of the older design. To maintain the interior packing space the same as in prior designs the outer dimensions would have to be increased. Thus the overall size of the trays would be larger, which would defeat the purpose of the cost reduction design. Alternatively, the carriers could be designed to fit into the new trays. It is an object of the invention to provide a basket-style carrier such that four carriers can be loaded into a packing tray of the new design.
Basket-style carriers not only are strong and easy to carry, but their design permits the top portions of bottles packaged in the carrier to be seen. This is advantageous when the distinctive shape of the top portions of the bottles or other packaged articles is suggestive of the brand. The unique shape of some articles, however, is not limited to their top portions but may include their overall appearance, including the design or configuration of the bottom portion. In such cases it is desirable to use a package which exposes as much of the article as possible. It would be expected, however, that such a package might create a problem of carrier strength, since to expose the articles more fully could require structural portions of carriers of conventional design to be eliminated. It would also be expected to create cost problems if the design of the blank from which the carrier is fabricated requires expensive fabrication techniques or if the carrier were to require a two-piece blank.
In addition to these potential problem areas, another area of practical concern is created when exposure of the lower portion of a bottle also exposes portions of the labels on the bottles. When a bottle carrier is checked out at a retail outlet the carrier is held so that the bar code can be read by the price scanner. If the bottle labels are exposed the scanner may read the bar code on an individual bottle label instead, thus charging the wrong price for the carrier.
In addition to the object stated above, another object of the invention is to provide an article carrier which allows major portions of packaged articles to be exposed to view, while providing adequate strength and guarding against erroneous price bar code readings.